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News Briefs

Prof. Bonnie Nardi and ICS Profs. Don Patterson and Bill Tomlinson won the UCI Celebration of Teaching Instructional Technology Innovation Award for 2015 for an online course they taught called “Global Disruption and IT.”

Prof. Crista Lopes has received $325,724 in DARPA funding for her research on “Software Datasets for Code Mining.”

January2015

Prof. Walt Scacchi has been awarded $117,500 by the Naval Postgraduate School, Acquisition Research Program for his research on “Achieving Better Buying Power through Acquisition of Open Architecture Software Systems for Web and Mobile Devices.” This marks the nineth consecutive award for Scacchi and ISR research associate Thomas Alspaugh from the NPS ARP.

Prof. Alfred Kobsa is the recipient of a $60,000 Google Faculty Research Award for his research on Predicting People’s Privacy Preferences for Ubiquitous Personal Data Disclosure. Kobsa will investigate the predictability of user privacy preferences in a ubiquitous personal data disclosure scenario.

Prof. Walt Scacchi hosted a visit by research fellow Klaas-Jan Stol from LERO, the Irish Software Engineering Research Center. At ISR, Stol explored Open Source Software (OSS) and Computer Games interests with Scacchi and Ph.D. student Michael Gorlick.

November2014

Alumnus Girish Suryanarayana’s book “Refactoring for Software Design Smells: Managing Technical Debt” (co-authored by Ganesh Samarthyam and Tushar Sharma; published by Morgan Kaufmann/Elsevier; with forewords by Grady Booch and Dr. Stéphane Ducasse) has been released. According to Suryanarayana (Ph.D. 2007; R. Taylor, advisor), this book is a must-read for software developers, designers, and architects who are looking to improve the quality of their design. It includes a collection of 25 structural design smells, and discusses how smells uncover mistakes made while designing, reveals what design principles were overlooked or misapplied, and identifies what principles need to be applied properly to address those smells through refactoring. Organized across common areas of software design, each smell is presented with diagrams and examples illustrating the poor design practices and the problems that result. The book describes how the overall quality of software can be improved significantly and technical debt can be reduced by finding and addressing smells in the design. The book also includes a number of anecdotes based on experiences in real-world projects.